Breakpoint

John Stonestreet and Warren Cole Smith discuss the stunningly clear ruling from the U. S. 8th Circuit Court of Appeals that the state of Minnesota cannot compel videographers Carl and Angel Larsen to engage in speech that violates their religious beliefs. Another win for the Alliance Defending Freedom and for us all.

They also discuss HHS citing the University of Vermont Medical Center for forcing a nurse --against her conscience--to participate in an elective abortion. It's pretty clear that HHS under this administration will enforce federal laws when it comes to religious freedom, whereas a certain previous administration was content to look the other way.

Finally, Warren and John discuss a new study that is setting the media on fire, a study that concluded there is no single "gay gene."

Resources

A Win for Free Speech and Conscience Rights…

John Stonestreet and David Carlson, BreakPoint, August 27, 2019

From Forcing Nuns to Freeing Nurses

John Stonestreet and Shane Morris, BreakPoint, August 30, 2019

"What Would You Say?"

The Colson Center's new video series to help you answer the tough questions

Holy Sexuality and the Gospel: Sex, Desire, and Relationships Shaped by God's Grand Story

Christopher Yuan, Multnomah, 2018

According to the records, in Fiscal Year 2018 the U.S. Health and Human Services Civil Rights Office received over a thousand complaints, alleging conscience violations or religious discrimination. That's significantly more than in any year recorded under the previous presidential administration.

One complaint came from a Catholic nurse working at the University of Vermont Medical Center. The unnamed nurse claims that her employer forced her to take part in an abortion, though she had informed the hospital of her pro-life beliefs. The nurse was scheduled to help a patient who had suffered a miscarriage, but when she walked into the operating room, she was expected to assist with an elective abortion. The doctor in charge allegedly said to her, “Don’t hate me.”

This is a university medical center that didn’t even practice elective abortions throughout most of its history, but a new rule instated in 2017 changed that and gave management the power to punish staffers who refuse to participate.

What this nurse experienced was a violation of federal law. According to what are known as the Church Amendments, healthcare personnel have “an unqualified right... to decline to participate in abortions without fear of adverse employment actions or loss of staff privileges.”

Under the Obama Administration, HHS ignored these laws. In fact, according to Roger Severino, who currently directs the Office of Civil Rights at HHS, the previous administration “systematically neglected” to enforce them.

Not anymore. On Wednesday, Severino issued a notice of violation against the Medical Center, giving them thirty days to comply with the law and allow medical staff to opt-out of abortions, or lose federal funding.

The hospital isn’t cooperating. In a statement, they claim HHS lacks the authority to conduct such an investigation, and that the hospital's forced abortion policy strikes “the appropriate and legal balance” between employees’ religious rights and patient care.

According to Severino, there isn’t a balance to strike. As he told The Atlantic, “Religious-freedom laws are the ones mentioned in the very first amendment to the Constitution. They have pride of place. And they have been neglected for too long.”

And get what he said next: “America reached a consensus after Roe v. Wade... Nobody should be forced to participate in [an abortion] against their will... How could we countenance a situation where we allow a federally funded entity to force a medical professional to participate in taking a human life? That’s what this case is about.”

I cannot even imagine anyone working in the previous HHS saying those words. During the Obama Administration, former Health and Human Services secretary Kathleen Sebelius mandated that all employers, with very few exceptions, provide free contraceptives and abortion-inducing drugs as part of their employee health insurance. In fact, they argued all the way to the Supreme Court that the Little Sisters of the Poor, a group of nuns, should be forced to comply with that mandate.

From forcing nuns to freeing nurses? Times have changed.

This isn’t just a win for conscience rights and the First Amendment, it vividly demonstrates that elections matter. People are policy. Which means, worldview matters. The law can be super clear, but if executive branch appointees are unwilling to enforce it, our freedoms are at stake.

And this story also demonstrates that cultural engagement is worth it. As Severino said, Americans have reached a consensus in the last forty years: No one should be forced to participate in abortions against their will.

With so many things in our culture going from unthinkable to unquestionable, it’s nice to see abortion move in the opposite direction. If and when an administration hostile to preborn life moves back in the White House, there’s still a forty year movement committed to protecting preborn life already in motion, and it's changing hearts and minds.

I thank God the HHS is under new management. Protecting nurses from violating their consciences is an infinite improvement over forcing nuns to violate theirs.

Presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren has famously compared having an abortion with getting your tonsils out. It’s not a fair analogy at all. Minors always need parental consent for a tonsillectomy, but in many parts of the country, a teenage girl can notify school officials she’s pregnant and walk into an abortion clinic without her parents ever knowing.

         In fact, teenagers need permission from parents for nearly any medical procedure, and even before getting a tattoo or body piercing. However, whenever a choice has to do with sex and gender increasingly parents are being left out in the cold, and the results are both distressing and infuriating.

         Consider the recent case of Jay Keck, a dad from Chicago, whose 14-year-old daughter suddenly announced that she was transitioning to be a boy.

         As he described recently in a USA Today opinion piece, four years ago, his daughter—who is on the autism spectrum—fell in with friends who convinced her she was trapped in the wrong body. She promptly renamed herself and demanded to be referred to by male pronouns. Her school obliged and shut her parents out.

         According to Keck, his daughter did not even fit the current, problematic description of a child suffering with gender dysphoria. She grew up playing with dolls. She liked to play dress up. A psychologist approved by the school district even agreed her identity struggles were “driven by her underlying mental health conditions.” Yet, fearing a backlash, he would only share this opinion off-the-record.

         The school ignored Keck’s requests that they use her given name, and he was horrified to discover that a social worker had told her about halfway houses for transgender teenagers, essentially encouraging his daughter to run away from home.

         On meeting with the school, Keck discovered that much of their behavior was due to a fear of non-existent laws. School officials cited President Obama’s “Dear Colleagues” letter from 2016, which urged districts to affirm transgender students. Those guidelines were blocked by a federal judge three months after they were issued and have now been rescinded by the Trump administration.

         The real pressure, it turns out, was coming from LGBT rights activists. For example, the ACLU sent letters to schools falsely informing them that the law prohibits them from disclosing a student’s gender identity to his or her parents.

         The pro-LGBT Human Rights Campaign partnered with the National Education Association to produce materials and guidelines advocating exactly the kind of behavior this school displayed.

         The sustained campaign of anti-parental-rights propaganda has also borne fruit in state-level bans on so-called “conversion therapy,” which makes it effectively illegal for mental health professionals to question chosen gender identities, even in minors.

         Last year, Lisa Littman at Brown University found that 87 percent of teenagers who announced a change of gender did so after so-called “cluster outbreaks” of dysphoria online or among friends. Her research, which was quickly slammed by activists and removed from the university’s website, described transgender outbreaks like these as a “social and peer contagion.”

         Now, in all kinds of ways, parents are hindered from fighting this contagion in defense of their own children.

         The fact that USA Today published Keck’s piece at all is encouraging. Hopefully, it’s a call to action. Parents who’ve lost their rights need to be heard. Ultimately, parents, not school districts or the media or activist groups, must be recognized as the primary guardians of their children’s well-being. Even those of us who teach our kids at home or send them to private schools, should be fighting misinformation and bad laws like these.

In the end, it could be a matter of self-preservation. In a country where parents have more say over tonsillectomies than gender transitions, it’s unlikely the right to opt our kids out will last long.

Anyone else dizzy by how quickly some things went from being unthinkable to unquestionable? Just in the last few years? Although the most recent demands of the Sexual Revolution are more radical than ever, people seem to be embracing them more quickly than ever.

For example, when Andrew Sullivan first made the case for same-sex marriage, in the New Republic back in 1989, the very notion was considered to be beyond the fringe, and it stayed that way for about two decades.

Then, suddenly, it wasn’t beyond the fringe anymore. By 2012, a majority of Americans favored same-sex marriage, and three years later, it became a constitutional right. Today, opposition or even ambivalence to same-sex marriage is regarded as “beyond the fringe.”

And the pace of change on sexual issues has only accelerated. Transgenderism was considered beyond the fringe when same-sex marriage was legalized, and I predict the acceptance of polyamory could happen even faster.

So what explains this quick and thorough collapse of the old moral consensus?

That’s what I talk about on the BreakPoint Podcast this week with sociologist Mark Regnerus of the University of Texas. Our conversation dug into a recent Public Discourse article he wrote: “How the Rise in Unreligious Americans affects Sex and Marriage: Comparative Evidence from New Survey Data.”

Just after the midterm elections in November 2018, Mark Regnerus asked three groups—Catholics, Evangelical Protestants, and the non-religious—about their opinions relating to marriage, family, and sexuality. He compared their responses with those from a survey he conducted three years prior.

What Regnerus found was that the nonreligious are now even more likely to hold “progressive” views on marriage, family, and sexuality, especially when compared to self-identified Catholics and Evangelicals.

For instance, 24 percent of the non-religious agreed with the statement “marriage is outdated,” compared to just 10 percent of Catholics and 2 percent of Evangelicals. Similarly, the non-religious were three times more likely to say that polyamorous relations were okay compared to Catholics and ten times more likely compared to Evangelicals. And, the non-religious were eight times as likely as Evangelicals to say that “sometimes extra-marital sex can be okay.”

Of course, the strong relationship between one’s religious observance and their view on marriage, family, and sex is no surprise. What makes Regnerus’ study so revealing is how rapidly the number of those who self-identify as non-religious has increased. In 2015, they made up 15 percent of the respondents. Four years later, they made up twenty percent, a one-third increase in only four years.

The non-religious are often called the “nones,” and it’s important to remember that relatively few of them are atheists or agnostics. Many believe in things like astrology and witchcraft and many consider themselves quite spiritual. But they reject authoritative religious traditions and institutions, and increasingly embrace progressive views on social issues.

But the even more “ominous” trend from this study is that even though there exists a significant disparity in views between the religious and non-religious, the religious are displaying trends of increasing liberalization too. “Catholics…have witnessed liberalization in attitudes,” Mark says, though “Evangelical numbers display a more modest uptick.” Regnerus concludes that Christians seem to be growing more complicit in the Sexual Revolution, or at least more quiet about their misgivings, year by year.

Don’t miss this important discussion with Mark Regnerus on the BreakPoint Podcast. It’s a conversation that will help you prepare when the next previously-unthinkable thing becomes conventional wisdom, which, at the rate we’re going, could be next week.

Today we present session two of “Doing the Right Thing: “An Exploration of Ethics,” with Brit Hume, Robert George, and Chuck Colson. This episode is entitled, "Is There a Moral Law We Can All Know?"

These sessions were filmed in front of a student audience. Each session ends with the panel taking questions from the students.

The Doing the Right Thing DVD Series as well as small group study guides are available at our online bookstore.

I’m no lawyer. Typically, I have to rely on those in our Colson Center orbit trained in law to help me interpret the legalese in a judge’s decision, but even I can understand the straightforward and sweeping language of Circuit Court Judge David Stras.

         “Carl and Angel Larsen wish to make wedding videos,” Judge Stras wrote. “Can Minnesota require them to produce videos of same-sex weddings, even if the message would conflict with their own beliefs? The district court concluded that it could and dismissed the Larsens’ constitutional challenge to Minnesota’s antidiscrimination law. [But] Because the First Amendment allows the Larsens to choose when to speak and what to say,” we reverse their decision.

How’s that for judicial clarity?

Because this is such an important case, I want to give you the background. And again, because of its clarity, I’ll use language from the ruling itself. The Larsens create “commercials, short films, and live-event productions.”  While they do business with anyone regardless of race, sex, gender, etc., they will not create videos that “contradict biblical truth; promote sexual immorality; support the destruction of unborn children; promote racism or racial division; incite violence; degrade women; or promote any conception of marriage other than as a lifelong institution between one man and one woman.”

You can guess which of those areas created problems for them. As Judge Stras’ decision put it, “The Larsens now wish to make films that promote their view of marriage as a ‘sacrificial covenant between one man and one woman.’”

According to the state of Minnesota, they can only do that if they will also, if asked, produce videos that paint same-sex marriage in a positive light. Otherwise, they would run afoul of the state’s anti-discrimination act and be subject to fines and even jail time.

The Larsens, with the help of the Alliance Defending Freedom, issued what’s called “a pre-enforcement challenge.” When a district court ruled against the Larsens, they appealed to the Eighth Circuit and prevailed.

The heart of the challenge had to do with the extent our free speech is truly free. Initially, this was the center of the defense of Masterpiece Cakeshop owner and cake artist Jack Phillips, but the Supreme Court ruled in his favor due to the gross mistreatment and disrespect he suffered at the hands of the Colorado Civil Rights Commission.

In his decision, Judge Stras left no question that creating video content is speech and must be protected. “The Larsens’ videos are a form of speech that is entitled to First Amendment protection,” he wrote. “The Supreme Court long ago recognized that ‘expression by means of motion pictures is included within the free speech and free press guaranty of the First and Fourteenth Amendments.’”

         The next question is whether the state can compel someone to promote messages they disagree with. The obvious answer that wasn’t obvious to the state of Minnesota or the Colorado Civil Rights Commission was obvious to Judge Stras: “The Supreme Court has recognized,” he wrote, “that the government still compels speech when it passes a law that has the effect of foisting a third party’s message on a speaker.”

         So now what happens? The case could make its way to the Supreme Court, which would be just fine according to David French. I agree with him that “it will be difficult to see [the Supreme Court] reversing the court of appeals” because the appeals court made such a strong case for “the constitutional order.”

         Let’s hope Minnesota won’t be as willfully defiant as the state of Colorado, who continued to harass Jack Phillips. Still, there remain plenty of local jurisdictions and state civil rights commissions who will attempt to curtail the religious freedoms of its citizens.

         That’s why we’ll need more courageous people like the Larsens, who live out their convictions with courage and kindness. And we’ll need to continue to support organizations like ADF. After all, one day, we may very well need their support.

New Jersey is the ninth state to legalize physician-assisted suicide. According to the state’s Medical Aid in Dying for the Terminally Ill Act, attending physicians can “write a prescription for medication that would enable a qualified terminally ill patient to end his or her life.”

The Act defines “terminally ill” as “the terminal stage of an irreversibly fatal illness, disease, or condition with … a life expectancy of six months or less.”  Only the “physician who has primary responsibility for the care of a patient and treatment of a patient’s terminal disease,” may write the life-ending prescription.

And what happens if the doctor’s conscience prevents him from writing the prescription?  While the Act is clear that “any action taken by a health care professional to participate… shall be voluntary...” it also requires the “health care professional” to “transfer, upon request, a copy of the patient's relevant records to the new health care professional or health care facility.”

So, while it would be far worse for New Jersey to coerce doctors to kill against their conscience, does honoring a patient’s request and making a referral mean one is still complicit in his or her death? Or, to put it differently, is the law still forcing physicians who want nothing to do with physician-assisted suicide to participate?

That is the opinion of Dr. Yosef P. Glassman. He recently filed suit to block implementation of the Act because he believes that being forced to refer patients to doctors who will kill them violates his religious beliefs. Dr. Glassman is particularly well-qualified to hold forth on his beliefs. Not only is he a physician specializing in the care of the elderly, he is also an Orthodox Rabbi.

Glassman told the Jewish Link that he “was motivated to act by the chilling prospect of being a part of the suicide process, which strongly conflicted with both my professional and religious values.”

After talking with several concerned Jewish community members on the topic, Glassman decided his work in geriatrics left him no choice but “to take a firm position.”

 “Some people who may oppose my action,” Glassman says, “may say that I want dying patients to suffer, chas v’shalom. Quite the opposite—we as physicians have ample tools to alleviate the suffering for the living, even for the terminally ill, without the need to license suicide.”

That Hebrew phrase he used, chas v’shalom, means “Heaven forbid.” It reveals that just as Dr. Glassman is religiously motivated not to kill, he’s also religiously motivated to heal and to alleviate suffering. In his mind, being forced to kill not only forces him to do what is wrong, it’s an obstacle to doing what he’s called to do.

The good news is that a New Jersey state judge has issued an order preventing the law from taking effect until the religious freedom issues Glassman raised have been adjudicated.

Still, Glassman’s case is a reminder of the increasing pressure being put on medical professionals to participate in the “Culture of Death.” No matter how often advocates paint physician-assisted suicide and abortion as “compassionate” care, many doctors rightfully want nothing to do with them.

This leaves the dilemma of to what degree unwilling physicians should be coerced to participate. Even if laws talk about “voluntary” participation, it’s nearly impossible to avoid the machinery of death once it carries the force of law.

Thankfully, physicians like Glassman are ethically coherent and willing to resist, and Jewish organizations like Agudath Israel are monitoring new laws like the one in New Jersey and are willing to help people like Dr. Glassman not violate their faith.

More than a few Christian pastors could learn from the moral clarity of Dr. Glassman and the advocacy of Agudath Israel. No Christian should be coerced to participate in the culture of death. And no Christian who refuses to participate should find themselves alone in their courage. Chas v’shalom that Christians should be any less determined to fight against this “Culture of Death.”

As America becomes less religious, with more and more people identifying as "nones" when it comes to religion, it's not surprising that American attitudes toward sex and marriage is changing, and not for the better. Clearly, on matters of marital fidelity, divorce, homosexuality, transgenderism, etc., non-religious people are more permissive than religious people. But,  as sociologist Mark Regnerus discusses with John Stonestreet on today's BreakPoint Podcast, even the attitudes of religious people on such issues are growing more permissive by the day. 

Mark Regnerus is professor of Sociology at the University of Texas at Austin, and a senior fellow at the Austin Institute for the Study of Family and Culture.

Resources

How the Rise in Unreligious Americans affects Sex and Marriage

Mark Regnerus, Public Discourse, August 19, 2019

The Economics of Sex (Video)

Austin Institute, February 14, 2004

John Stonestreet and Warren Cole Smith discuss the New York Times "1619 Project," which marks the 400th anniversary of the arrival of slavery to the American colonies. While the 1619 Project reminds us of this important and tragic anniversary, its express purpose is to "reframe the country's history."

John and Warren also discuss the targeting of people with disabilities by the transgender movement, Netflix's sensationalist portrayal of Doug Coe and the Fellowship in  its series "The Family," and Alyssa Milano's false representation of abortion as a positive good for women.

Resources

The 1619 Project

New York Times Magazine

Down syndrome drag show kicked out of venue

WOOD TV, August 22, 2019

 Power Players: A lack of understanding of evangelicalism weakens The Family

Megan Basham, WORLD Magazine, August 15, 2019

Few things will bring on the goosebumps like listening to Winston Churchill’s 1940 “fight them on the beaches” speech, easily one of the strongest statements of national unity and patriotic defiance in all of human history.

         The prime minister spoke for a people who, as he said, would “never surrender,” and he was right. Even with London smoldering from the Blitz and the nation standing virtually alone against Hitler’s war machine, they didn’t break. And their persistence eventually saw the tide turn and Europe liberated.

         The secret to their endurance is really not a secret at all. The British in Churchill's day were a people with a purpose. Churchill called what they faced a fight against tyranny, and the nation believed him. As C. S. Lewis observed in his wartime radio addresses, some of which later became part of his book “Mere Christianity,” the Nazis really were wrong, and the Allies really were right. Good and evil exist and can be known. That, Lewis observed, was a signpost to the meaning of life.

         Britain has undergone quite a transformation since Churchill’s speech. Last week, the Sun reported on a new, nationwide survey that plied 1,500 Brits of all ages with a variety of questions about their attitudes and beliefs. Among the results: a stunning 89 percent of those aged 16 to 29 said their lives lack meaning and purpose.

         In other words, Nihilism is running rampant among Millennial and Gen-Z Brits. Just half of those aged 60 and over gave similarly hopeless answers, which is still not a great result but certainly better than 89 percent.

The Sun suggests this means people find purpose in life as they age. Or, it could mean that Brits are steadily losing a sense of meaning and purpose with each generation.

         Evidence for the latter interpretation comes from the answers participants gave to other questions: 84 percent of young people said they’re failing to “live their best life.” Nearly 40 percent also said they’d choose to re-do their lives if they could.

         And, what would they change if they could hit that “reset” button? Over half of Brits believe they were put on earth to be as happy as possible. Only 37 percent said their purpose is to make other people happy. Less than a third thought they exist to do as much good as possible.

         I can’t help wondering how different the results would be if this survey had been conducted in the middle of World War II. Would the British have been similarly aimless and preoccupied with personal happiness and fulfillment? Would almost 90 percent of young people, who bore the brunt of the war, say their lives lacked meaning? I doubt it. I don’t think a British population that hopeless would have had the resolve to withstand the Nazi assault and help lead the Allies to victory.

         So, what happened? How did the Brits, who out-lasted the Blitz, transform into people unsure of life’s very purpose? My colleague Shane Morris and I wrestled with this question on last week’s “BreakPoint This Week,” and we offered a number of related answers, all rooted in the power of ideas.

         When Churchill made those thundering moral pronouncements on behalf of his nation, he didn’t conduct a poll to find out who thought the Nazis were wrong or worth fighting. He didn’t ask each citizen to define their “best life.” And he certainly didn’t elevate individual happiness to the top of his wartime priorities.

         But in a world where meaning is up to us, where life supposedly means whatever we say it does, it ultimately comes to mean nothing. A culture that abandons any fixed reference point and instead tells its young people that truth, purpose, meaning, and morality are purely subjective, will only, in the end, rob them of any truth, purpose, meaning, or morality worth fighting for.

         Churchill rallied his nation to a “righteous cause.” That sort of call requires vertical thinking, a people who embrace a transcendent sense of meaning. And what the world saw were the storms a people like that could weather. Today, Britain and so much of the western world is discovering that a people without a transcendent sense meaning can’t even weather peacetime.